Adventures du jour!
After running across such upsetting thoughts about creativity and success yesterday, I shouldn’t have been surprised that more trauma and other junk shook out last night and this morning.
Writing went okay, but I hit mental capacity again. I wrote a couple of hundred words on stuff I knew wouldn’t work (so my brain could come up with something better while I slept). There’s something I need to get at with Goth Girl about what it’s like to have to be the person who’s holding things together. She’s in a van driving someone to cover someone else’s work while everyone else is trying to handle the bad guys, and it’s uncomfortable for her not to be in the middle of things. There’s something I want to say in the scene that’s not about how necessary it is, or how it’s unfair that certain types of people get stuck in such roles whether they’re apt for it or not, but I don’t know what. I’ll work on it.
I usually won’t mention people by name when they influence how my day goes, because I don’t know for sure that they’re comfortable with it. BUT Rob Mark put his suggestion for muscle knowledge/posture help in comments yesterday rather than in a private message, so I’ll assume it’s okay to talk about it. He recommended the YouTube channel ATHLEAN-X, where I looked up posture advice and found that the thing with my hips is an anterior pelvic tilt, and that I need to stretch the muscles at the front of my hips and build glute strength. Last night I looked up a couple of good yoga things for same, jotted them down, went to bed.
I got up this morning after sleeping in fits and starts and woke up sore all up and down the hips and torso. I did most of a sun salute, tossed in the first of the new things to try (down dog splits, which stretch the fronts of the hips AND require the glutes to engage), and just started crying. On the one hand, that’s totally a good thing, because WOW did I confirm where the tension is residing. Experiment = success. On the other hand, UGH. I held the pose all the way through and then curled back into child’s pose to recuperate and grieve, although no idea (at that point) for what.
I skipped to the walk right away after that. I just couldn’t hold still any longer. Shockingly, all the pain I’d been feeling earlier was gone. Just gone. Even in areas that I hadn’t stretched.
Out on the walk, what I got was that I’d been treating myself like disposable trash for a long, long time, and that doing so meant that not only had I hurt myself (which is hard to prioritize, if you’re in a place where you treat yourself badly anyway) but I’d let down people I care about, probably more than I’ll ever know. I just wasn’t there. I didn’t listen. I blew them off. In a way, I get it: it wasn’t safe to get close to a lot of people when I was with my ex. Everything, and everyone, including Ray, had to be droppable at a moment’s notice, or there would be a huge fight within a day or two. I also had a yucky minor trauma barf about the ex and why I was flinching away from some stuff. Hopefully I can start separating out what is from what used to be.
There are worse sins than not being there for people when you yourself are in a bad spot, I know, but this is what gets to me and is probably what I need to feel in order to take better care of myself.–I know several people I’m close to who do this to themselves, too, and even if I can’t fix it for them, I can at least understand it better and just calmly let the storm pass by when it hits and be there if and when they want company.
There’s a balance between mindlessly unconditional love (which was a tool that the ex used to shame and control me: if only I’d loved him better and been more patient and accepted more wrongs, after all, he wouldn’t have been the way he was) and lashing out at the people around you out of fear that they’ll eventually reject you (my mom’s path). Apparently for me that balance gets carried in those front muscles of my hips, and they’ve been out of whack.
A couple of times on the walk I hit some really negative, judgy thoughts about creative work, and other muscles in my hips tensed up. I stopped and had the thought, then gave my body time to unclench. I expect to have to deal with those other thoughts separately. This was enough for today. I’ve been sad all morning.
Midjourney: I finally posted the project I’d been working on a couple of days ago, sketches for a story about clones, AI, and the fae. I posted them on Instagram as reels, and I don’t know whether they came over to Facebook. (Maybe not?) Anyway, experiment. I’m really not happy with the images, although it’s not the images’ fault. I feel like I’m not asking the right questions yet, like there’s something I’m trying to reach as a storyteller that I haven’t sorted out yet. I’ll chew on it.
We’ve been having electrical issues since Hurricane Ian, and the maintenance guys have been working on it. Today the head guy came over to check the outlets again: they’re working fine now, but the issues really only start after 5 p.m. and people get back from work–and then the lights/power on one wall flicker on and off all evening, without popping any breakers. Long story short, the head office is contacting TECO, the power company, to see if it’s on their end.
Anyway, good guy. English isn’t his first language, but he’s apparently also a master of improv theater, because he had a full-on dramatic interpretation of water issues we’ve been having, where one person called and said that they had a water leak but it turned out to be two entire days of flooding in three other apartments whose residents didn’t call, including one apartment where the water was literally over an inch deep throughout the entire apartment. I laughed all the way through the dramatic explanation and storytime in broken English. Then we had a discussion about some of the Halloween decorations around the area, including one that I posted this morning (the chemical waste one). We laughed about the skelly with no arms and I told him to check out the giant animatronic clown. Then he talked about taking his eight-year-old son to Disney. He was saying that you might be thirty-four years old, like he was, when you stepped inside the gate, but soon you were twenty, then sixteen, then twelve, ten…and finally eight years old again, along with your son.
Amen.